Presenter(s): Madeline Rogers − Psychology
Faculty Mentor(s): Jenn Lewis, Don Tucker
Poster 124
Research Area: Social Science
Dissociation is a mental process characterized by a lack of connection in a person’s cognition, memory or sense of identity. Often seen in clinical populations and as a normative trait, increased dissociative tendencies have been suggested to be an adaptive mechanism used to enhance performance and/or personal experience. The current study sought to replicate previous research that investigated the effects of dissociation on performance and memory under different attentional settings. Undergraduate students, grouped based on their results of the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES: Bernstein & Putnam, 1986), participated in an emotional Stroop task and free recall memory task under selective and divided attention conditions. Consistent with previous findings, low-DES participants became significantly slower after switching to the divided attention condition. Unexpectedly, high-DES participants did not show significant differences in response time after switching from selective to divided attention conditions, suggesting that added difficulty of the task did not impair performance. Both groups remembered significantly more trauma-related words than neutral words under both conditions. The results of this study replicated some of the results of earlier studies, but it also failed to replicate some effects. This research provides more evidence towards discerning what effects dissociation has on cognition, but if and how dissociative tendencies act as an adaptive mechanism for cognition remains unclear.